Archive

This research project explores how genomic data can inform the understanding of social science questions. The genomic revolution means that social scientists are able to correlate a range of outcomes and behaviors with genes. This research studies what these correlations mean.

This research project deepens our understanding of labor market conditions during the Great Depression by assemling data at the national, state, and industry level for jobs created, jobs destroyed, unemployment, employment, and the labor force.

This research project examines how the spatial pattern of inequality in US cities shapes the provision of public transit and more broadly the prospects for a more equitable and sustainable transportation policy.

This research project shows the European origins of development economics between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and describes how the postwar global challenge of development took shape.

This research project investigates how gender and race affect the earnings of African American, Latina, and Asian American women in the United States over five decades, from 1970 to 2010.

This research project explores the causes and consequences of the way countries innovate and the economic foundations for the government’s direct involvement in conducting innovation.

This research project constructs a broad set of software tools designed to better facilitate the understanding and comparative features of various types of agent-based finical markets.

This research project improves the mathematical capabilities of non-Neoclassical economics and uses modern techniques from nonlinear dynamical systems to model the expansion and contraction of credit and its effect on real economic output and asset prices.

This research project employs ideas from statistical physics to deal with income and wealth inequality, financial instability, and the distribution of energy consumption around the world.

This research project investigates the impact of the new style of central banking on the bank’s solvency, its ability to control inflation, and on economic stability.

This research project builds a new generation of models fit to analyze and manage the challenges of governing globalized and interconnected economies.

This research project combines 140 years of economic history with state-of-the-art econometric methods to gain new insights into the relationship between finance, growth, and crises.

This research project examines the informational inefficiency of market prices in the presence of Knightian uncertainty or ambiguity by modeling the decision making of financial market traders.

The tension between efficiency and equilibrium is a central feature of economic systems. In many contexts, social networks mediate this trade-off: an individual’s network position determines equilibrium play, and social relations allow coordination on an efficient norm.

The economics of religion is a relatively new field of research in economics. This survey serves two purposes – it is backward-looking in that it traces the historical and sociological origins of this field, and it is forward-looking in that it examines the insights and research themes that are offered by economists to investigate religion globally in the modern world.

Bill Mitchell presents a coherent analysis of how money is created, how it functions in global exchange rate regimes, and how the mystification of the nature of money has constrained governments, and prevented states from acting in the public interest.

Full paper is here. Comments are much welcome.And because it’s an epic story (and because I suck at writing abstracts), here is an audio trailer. I thank Paul for his beautiful Memphis accent.

How should the Eurozone handle unemployment and other immediate hurdles?

A more realistic version of how people “maximize utility”

The recently observed surge in wealth doesn’t equate to growth of productive capital. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Branko Milanovic, Paul Krugman and Duncan Foley discuss these issues and more.

This paper examines the effects of intra-financial lending – claims between financial institutions – on aggregate investment and credit to the non-financial sector in the United States.

Few would argue that America’s fortunes rise and fall on its ability to generate technological innovations — to put bold ideas to work and then bring them to market.

One of the earliest attempts to tackle the problem of multiple equilibria in Macroeconomics was a byproduct of David Cass and Karl Shell’s engagement with Robert Lucas’s 1972 paper on ‘Expectations and the Neutrality of Money.’

There is widespread and growing concern about the availability of good jobs in the U.S. economy. Inequality has been growing for thirty years and is now at levels not seen since the 1920s. Stable and remunerative employment has become harder for U.S. workers to find.

How can we better integrate history into economic analysis?

This paper examines the evolution of intra-financial sector lending in the United States, 1950- 2012, presenting estimates constructed from the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds Accounts.

Bill Black knows banks.

How can the state manage its central role in the innovation economy if the state itself has become an instrument for facilitating corporate predation?

How should the government recoup the benefits from the fruits of its research? And what role should the government play going forward in important areas such as clean tech?

Household economic surveys, such as the German Socio-Economic Panel, notoriously underestimate the degree of income and wealth inequality at the upper end of the distribution.

Rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95 percent of the US personal income distribution beginning about 1980.

The “keys under the streetlight story” is well known among economists, but in case you haven’t heard it, it goes like this.

In the wake of World War II, much of the western world, particularly the United States, adopted a new form of capitalism called “managerial welfare-state capitalism.”

An Open Letter to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

I was going to call this blog post ‘Utility maximising agents in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments’ but realised that was much too dull - even if it accurately describes my bedtime reading at the present moment.

Apple should be returning profits to workers who have invested their time and effort into generating its products and to taxpayers who have funded the investments in the physical infrastructure and human knowledge so critical to Apple’s success.

The paper referenced in this post, “Financialization and U.S. Income Inequality, 1970–2008,” recently was awarded the 2014 Outstanding Article Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association.

These videos cover not only Dr. de Cecco’s seminal research on the international gold standard, but his views on the international monetary system between the wars, the formation of the Bretton Woods system, and its breakdown – all topics on which Dr. de Cecco has written copiously.

In the spring of 1940, as the war in Europe escalated and the likelihood of American involvement grew greater and greater, scientists understood that they would soon be drafted to help national defense planning.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank celebrate their 70th anniversary this year, yet few countries have been eager to join the festivities.

Last Spring Larry Summers wounded Thomas Piketty in a friendly embrace.

Has the euro experiment largely failed to meet the needs of the people who use it? If so, what can be done? Andrea Terzi suggests innovative ways to repair the Eurozone’s flawed fiscal architecture.

The question of underdevelopment and development policies in postwar Europe will be the theme of a workshop organized by Michele Alacevich, Sandrine Kott, and Mark Mazower, at Columbia University, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Friday, October 10, 2014. The program is available here. Below are some of Alacevich’s insights on the issue leading up the event:

Peter Victor challenges the basis of our obsession with economic growth

Anyone who has spent time in a developing country knows the importance of social connections. Among their many roles, these connections help individuals land jobs, and provide them with credit and other forms of support.

Employment as University Professor is by comparison with the grind of the professional world a peaceful, perhaps even relaxing, assignment.

Fred Block discusses his book, “The Power of Market Fundamentalism”.

Government safety nets give protected institutions an implicit subsidy and intensify incentives for value-maximizing boards and managers to risk the ruin of their firms. Standard accounting statements do not record the value of this subsidy and forcing subsidized institutions to show more accounting capital will do little to curb their enhanced appetite for tail risk.

The New York Times is having a “Room For Debate” discussion on its Opinion Page about how corporations should handle profits based on the Harvard Business Review article “Profits Without Prosperity” by William Lazonick of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who is a grantee of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The discussion features contributions by Bruce Greenwald, Peter Thiel, and Lazonick, among others. Lazonick argues that the capital being used for stock buybacks would be better spent on investment. Lazonick’s “Room For Debate” piece is below. To read the full discussion on The New York Times, click here.

Will the “Celtic Tiger” re-emerge or is Ireland’s recovery stunted by austerity programs?

With the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, the American public has become increasingly concerned about the scale and impact of inequality in economic life.

The flummery of capital-requirement repairs undertaken in response to the Great Financial Crisis.

How does the law interact with finance? Katharina Pistor on the paradoxical relationship between law and finance.

We can change who we are. We can improve ourselves in various ways, and we can give ourselves possibilities to grow intellectually.

As the financial economy has expanded beginning in the mid-1980s, it has done so in part by selling more products to individuals and households.

We analyze the political environment in the wake of financial crises and try to infer its implications on decision making and economic policies.

We show how every stock-flow consistent model of the macroeconomy can be represented as a directed acyclic graph.

In the past decade and a half, state and local public employee retirement systems in the United States have significantly shifted their fund investment strategies toward a greater allocation in alternative investments. Today, roughly $660 billion of public pension funds are invested in hedge funds and private equity funds. These alternative investments typically require new governance structures within the pension funds in order to adequately monitor accompanying risks and returns, management fee arrangements and investment complexity.

Why do so many people who should know better argue that Neoliberalism ‘does not exist’?

What is the scale of effort that is actually required to initiate global cyber warfare? Amir Herzberg elaborates on cyber security, cyber warfare and basic privacy in the global digital age.

Can we learn something from philosophy students?

Many believe that we already have a healthcare problem. But let’s get this straight: healthcare is a solution. Joon Yun posits a new way of thinking about health, illness and aging.

Has the Dodd-Frank Act had its intended effect?

The 2007-2009 financial crisis initially appeared to have destroyed a huge amount of wealth in the U.S.

Before reforming economics, we need to reform the discourse.

Ever since 2008, increasing numbers of economists, students, and even market professionals have protested the way economics is currently taught and practiced.

Readers of Minsky are familiar with the idea that governments should act as financial stabilizing agents for their economies by running surpluses in times of boom and deficits in times of crises.

Ajay Kela on creating a culture of entrepreneurship in India.

The glass ceiling is typically examined in terms of the distribution of earnings. This column discusses the glass ceiling in the gender distribution of total incomes, including self-employment and capital income. Evidence from Canada and the UK shows we are still far from equality. Though the proportion of women in the top 1% has been rising, the progress is slower, almost non-existent, at the very top of the distribution.

Our welfare depends not only on our actual consumption, but also on alternate choices wedid not make.

This year, the History of Economics Society (HES) meeting was organized at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The meeting was, on the whole, a nice affair, there were plenty of interesting sessions, I reconvened with old friends and was able to present there my latest work and receive constructive comments.

Improved access to education is often touted as the key to addressing racial inequality in the economy, but Lisa Cook’s research into the innovation economy shows that women and African-Americans are underrepresented despite their educational qualifications.

Inspired by the Coasean “market vs firm” dichotomy, we offer a new definition of efficiency by applying the notions of network cost and network efficiency as developed in complex network theory.

It is impossible to tell the history of American antitrust law and economics during the so-called formative era (1890- 1915) without a preliminary understanding of the economic rationale underlying that major phase of American constitutional law commonly called laissez faire constitutionalism, or Lochner era.

India has for the last twenty years been undergoing a rapid and abiding structural shift in its pattern of development. The transformation of the economy from the period of the license raj to the post liberalization era has wrought many changes, with somewhat ambiguous implications.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researchers and collaborators data mine 200 years of US Patent Office records to uncover the true nature of innovation.

The Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM) organises its 18th annual conference on Inequality and the Future of Capitalism with introductory lectures on heterodox economics for graduate students.

Can Economists Be Adequate Without Studying History?

Eric Weinstein of Thiel Capital, a mathematician, physicist, and economist, explains the issues around economic thought and their potential consequences.

Robert Skidelsky knocks the scientific halo off mainstream economists’ teaching and research

So how far have we come since Lehman? How much more do we have to do?

What if innovation is not an unalloyed good for society? What if it simply adds to our current dystopian dysfunction?

Institute President Rob Johnson interviews David Cay Johnston about his new book, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality.

A nation must accumulate a high-tech knowledge base to prosper.

The more reflexive mode brought by the financial crisis to macroeconomics made economists more outspoken about methodological, historical and sociological issues: how have we come to the DSGE dogma? What are its limitations? How can we produce alternative knowledge? Do publishing practices favor a “monolithic” thinking, and if so, how can we change it? What about the graduate training in economics?

Thomas Piketty vs. Luigi Pasinetti and John Maynard Keynes

This paper is based on a social accounting matrix (SAM) which incorporates the size distribution of income based on data from the BEA national accounts, the widely discussed 2012 CBO distribution study, and BLS consumer surveys.

Using data on industrial air pollution exposure in the United States, we compute three measures of environmental inequality: the Gini coefficient of exposure, the ratio of median exposure of minorities to that of non-Hispanic whites, and the ratio of median exposure of poor households to that of nonpoor households.

In late 2007, the United States started feeling the effects of the Great Recession. And over the ensuing two years the economic disaster spread across the globe.

There is a new economics rock-star touring the US by all accounts, and his name is Thomas Piketty.

The financial crisis of 2008, and the subsequent worldwide economic depression and continuing dislocation, have made little to no impression on the way macroeconomics is taught at the university level, from Economics 101 through graduate school. It has been “business as usual’, which (it seems to me) means an almost studious avoidance of any attempt to acquire knowledge of how monetary economies actually work.

How to rebalance Chinese economy has become a topic of heated discussion. After years of fast economic expansion, now China faces a difficult crossroad. The global financial crisis provided clear evidence that China’s traditional export-driven strategy is vulnerable to slumps of the external demand.